QA Lead, Quality Engineering (The Architect of "It Just Works")

Do you believe the best bug is the one that never gets written? Are you the kind of quality obsessive who'd rather redesign the process that lets bugs in than spend your life swatting them at the end of the line? And — be honest — have you already wired an AI agent into your test workflow and felt a little smug about it? If so, read on… I'm the CTO at RTA, and I'm looking for a QA Lead, Quality Engineering to own how quality happens across our entire engineering organization. This is not a people-management role. You won't have direct reports, and that's the point: your job is to be a force multiplier. You'll set the practices, build the tooling, raise the bar, and make every engineer, product manager, and QA analyst around you better at shipping software that just works. You'll do this hands-on and at the architecture level — equal parts master craftsperson, internal consultant, and quiet revolutionary. If you want a role where influence comes from what you build and how you think rather than how many people report to you, keep reading. What We Are Looking For Is passionate about serving others. Takes pride in the craft of quality and finds fulfillment in seeing the whole team ship better, not just in catching things themselves. Is comfortable being part of a team that thrives on healthy conflict. People with thin skin need not apply. No, seriously. You'll be telling senior engineers how to make their code more testable. Is adaptable and open to feedback. You welcome constructive criticism and use it as a tool for continuous improvement. Passionately cares about our clients by helping them be more successful. Our clients are fleet managers, parts clerks, and automotive technicians who maintain everything from squad cars to school buses—so everyone comes home safely at the end of the day. Thinks of themselves less, while not thinking less of themselves. Other-centric, compassionate, and self-assured. Is willing to lift boxes, clean floors, and hold doors if that's what it takes to get something done, because no job is beneath them. Takes ownership and initiative. You spot how to make things better and don't wait to be told. Loves to read, learn, grow, and stretch themselves. Bonus points for each book you've read by Patrick Lencioni! Specifically for This Job, Someone Who: Lives and breathes "shift left." You understand in your bones that quality is cheapest at the keyboard and most expensive in production. You spend your energy preventing defects — better requirements, testable design, fast feedback loops — not just detecting them at the end. Is genuinely, deeply technical. You read the code. You can pair with an engineer on a tricky integration test, reason about flaky pipelines, and architect a test strategy across unit, API, contract, integration, and end-to-end layers. You know the testing pyramid isn't a suggestion. Is fluent in modern AI for quality — and skeptical in the right places. You've used AI to generate and maintain test cases, expand coverage, triage failures, summarize root cause, draft test data, and turn plain-English requirements into executable checks. You know where AI accelerates the work and where it quietly introduces risk, and you can tell the difference. Builds tooling, not just test cases. You treat the quality platform as a product: CI/CD quality gates, automation frameworks, self-healing tests, coverage dashboards, and the developer experience around all of it. You make the right thing the easy thing. Owns practices across the org without owning people. You influence through clarity, working code, and trust. You set the standards that engineering and QA actually want to follow because they obviously make life better. Interfaces beautifully with Product and Engineering leaders. You can sit with a product manager and sharpen acceptance criteria, then turn around and talk architecture with a staff engineer, and translate fluently between them. Is data-driven about quality. Escape rate, defect density, mean time to detect, flake rate, coverage that actually means something — you measure what matters and use it to drive change, not vanity dashboards. Has familiarity with Cypress, Playwright, or similar modern automation frameworks — and opinions about when to use which. Has extensive experience in software quality, particularly within SaaS, and has seen what great (and terrible) quality cultures look like up close. What You'll Actually Do Define the quality strategy for RTA's products and the practices that make it real across every delivery team. Champion shift-left everywhere: testable design reviews, definition-of-ready and definition-of-done that hold up, fast and trustworthy feedback in CI, and risk-based testing focused where it counts. Build and evolve the automation and AI tooling that lets a lean QA function punch far above its weight — including responsibly integrating AI agents and assistants into the testing lifecycle. Coach and uplevel engineers and QA analysts on quality practices, test design, and AI-assisted workflows — through example, pairing, and the occasional well-timed "what if we tried it this way?" Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to bake quality into planning, not bolt it on at the end. Watch the horizon. Quality tooling and AI are moving fast; you bring the best of it back and separate signal from hype. Key Results Areas (aka the Job Outcomes) Fewer Bugs Born: Measurable reduction in defects introduced, not just defects caught — quality moves upstream. Faster, More Trustworthy Feedback: Shorter test cycles and pipelines engineers actually trust, with flakiness driven down. AI-Leveraged Quality: AI meaningfully woven into the testing lifecycle, with documented gains in coverage, speed, or effort saved — and clear guardrails. A Higher Bar, Org-Wide: Quality practices adopted across teams because they're good, raising the whole org's game without adding headcount. Customer Satisfaction: High customer satisfaction tied to product quality and reliability. Qualifications Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, or a related field (preferred — demonstrated mastery matters more). 7+ years in software quality / quality engineering, with a track record of setting practices and building tooling beyond your own desk. Hands-on automation experience (Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, or similar) and comfort in a real codebase. Demonstrated use of AI tools in a quality or engineering workflow — and a point of view on doing it responsibly. Strong grasp of CI/CD, test architecture, and agile delivery. Experience with JIRA, Confluence, and modern test management tooling. Proficient with Microsoft 365 products (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint). The Bottom Line You've made it this far, congratulations! We're looking for an ideal team player with an almost frightening intensity around quality and a passion for serving others — someone who'd rather make a hundred engineers better than be the best tester in the room (though you might be that too). About Us RTA has been established since 1979 and has the reputation of providing the best customer service in the market. Our purpose is to help fleets succeed. We pride ourselves on creating a caring, family-oriented atmosphere for both staff and clients, and love that our work makes a positive impact on the lives we touch. Our clients carry kids in school buses, first responders in emergency vehicles, patients in ambulances, food and medical supplies in trucks, and people just taking the bus or train to work. We do meaningful work, and we want our clients to have the best tools available to them. Our office spaces are open, spacious, and colorful, with plenty of natural light. We come together often as a company to enjoy freshly baked desserts or awesome lunches and genuinely enjoy each other's company. We offer some pretty unique perks and benefits, as well as all the standard ones. We're happy to talk through all the opt